Those who understand ecology on a level that doesn't have cheap commodities as a prerequisite understand there's a straightforward solution to this. Restore natural pollinator habitat (fuck your lawn) and stop treating them like slaves.
I bought 5 pounds of clover seed this spring and spread it through my lawn... and it's amazing. I plan on getting 20 pounds this fall and doing the rest of my lawn, and probably going to get some creeping red thyme for my fence rows.
How does that fix a virus spread by parasitic mites?
Well we could stop dousing our planet in poison just for weed free and pest free grass, for starters. I know it's not as bad as what we use on farm crops, but every little bit counts. The bees are stressed and dying because of that stress.
Let me be clear: natural lawns are a good thing, and my wife and I are converting over piece by piece. However, I think people jumped to that conclusion here because they're already preconditioned to it. Natural lawns are never going to undo the damage caused by overuse of agricultural pesticides.
Yeah, just because we can reduce our use of pesticides doesn't suddenly make all of the bee colonies we killed with it come back to life. I get that.
But nature is resilient and if we stop dousing everything in nerve toxins then maybe we'll see the ecological web of insect life doing its thing again. That improves the soil and plant life, gives food to small critters, and both of those indirectly helps the bees. So it kind of does undo the damage in a roundabout way.
You need to convince farmers of that, not people who own suburban lawns. Though people with suburban lawns should convert over, their affect is going to be small compared to hundreds of acres of farm run by a few people.
I'm curious, when the lawn is kept natural, doesn't it have a lot of ticks?
Probably not unless you have lots or animals crossing it. Ticks require hosts to feed and transport over significant distance I think.
My lawn isn't totally natural because I mow it, but I don't use any chemicals. Despite some trees and shrubs, my yard doesn't have ticks. We have grubs, mice, shrews, squirrels, birds, and occasional poison ivy that we pull up, but no ticks. They are in the park (with forest) a couple blocks away, but not in the trimmed lawns in my chunk of suburbia.
from Wikipedia:
Ticks like shady, moist leaf litter with an overstory of trees or shrubs and, in the spring, they deposit their eggs into such places allowing larvae to emerge in the fall and crawl into low-lying vegetation. The 3 meter boundary closest to the lawn's edge are a tick migration zone, where 82% of tick nymphs in lawns are found.
In context of bees isn't the trim important? I mean, for the grass to have flowers for the pollinators, shouldn't it be untrimmed? And hence prone to inviting ticks?
There are diverse pollinators that are native. These honeybees are not native to the Americas. Having a spread of native species do the job should be more resistant to these kinds of infestations.
Okay but how do you create billions of diverse native species in South Dakota and ship them across the entire nation while they're all actively hostile to each other?
You would need to create competitive local pollinator markets in every state or risk creating a famine by banning Honeybees.
Like it or not, nature cannot handle Humans in the numbers we currently exist in and Honeybees are a part of our food chain to sustain those numbers.
Did you read the article? Freeing the slaves gives them the capacity to recover.
Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex, says the study provided no evidence that the viral load was higher in weaker colonies. “Almost all bee colonies have these viruses, but they only do significant harm when the colony is stressed.”
That would save colonies near suburban areas. That would not save colonies surrounded by hundreds of acres of farm. There is far, far more farmland in the US than suburban yards.
Slaves? Oh FFS. Have you talked to the bees lately? Maybe they like having nice manmade hives.
They don't. The process of getting them to make honey is based on driving them to be in panicked, disaster recovery mindset all the time.
Well, Scott, I'm beginning to think you're no apiarist at all.
Lawns aren't the problem, it is agriculture. Now the problem is affordable food vs the environment.
Lawns aren't the problem but they are a problem
Capitalism, fucking up the ecosystems since 18th century
In case anybody was wondering, the honeybee declines in China and Europe are also substantial and worrisome. I haven't heard about Africa but I think it's safe to assume when there's missing data for a global problem that it's affecting them, too.
Even the honeybees don't want to be here anymore
Scientists have been scrambling to discover what happened; now the culprits are emerging. A research paper published by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), though not yet peer-reviewed, has found nearly all colonies had contracted a bee virus spread by parasitic mites that appear to have developed resistance to the main chemicals used to control them.
Varroa mites spreading disease.
Adee says: “We had mites for 20 years, and we never had over 3% losses.” He believes there is a “combination of things” that makes the bees more stressed and the mites more deadly.
He cites the use of neonicotinoid insecticides in the US, which harm bees’ nervous system, paralysing and ultimately killing them. Some researchers have warned of neonicotinoids causing another “silent spring”, referring to Rachel Carson’s 1962 book on the effects of the insecticide DDT on bird populations.
Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex, says the study provided no evidence that the viral load was higher in weaker colonies. “Almost all bee colonies have these viruses, but they only do significant harm when the colony is stressed.”
'Could' is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting there.
I think it's accurate. The article points out that Varroa Mites have become resistant to all known chemical pesticides used to control them previously. So if A) Bees develope resistance tot he virus spread by the Mites or B) humans develop new mite control solutions, then there won't be a death spiral.
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